Oceans of Fire (51 page)

Aleksandr staggered and that steadied her. She took a deep breath. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.” She stopped abruptly and glared at him. “You knew. You rotten, deceitful bastard, you knew all along my parents were coming, didn’t you? Aunt Carol told you.”

He arched an eyebrow, unperturbed by her accusation. “She may have mentioned it when she was here earlier.”

“The
only
reason I’m helping you into the house instead of pushing you off the deck is that you’re still hurt. Any promises are negated.”

“Not a chance, Abbey. I’m holding you to the promise.” He sat on the bed and wiped small beads of sweat from his forehead.

“It was made under duress and you tricked me.” She brought him a washcloth. “Here, this will help. You’re trying to do too much, Aleksandr. You can’t recover from wounds like you have this fast. You have to stop pushing yourself so hard. You almost died. You would have died without Prakenskii‘s magic. I shouldn’t have allowed you to make love like that. We just get so carried away.”

He pulled her to him. “I love you, Abbey. We didn’t get carried away. We just need each other. There’s a difference.”

Abigail kissed him. “I love you right back, Aleksandr Volstov, but I have no idea why. You’re bossy and you insist on thinking you’re invincible.” She washed him quickly and helped him into a pair of sweatpants and a soft shirt. “You look pale. Do you need something for the pain? Libby is going to kill me for this.”

“Stop, Abbey,” he said, his voice tender. “Libby isn’t going to know. We didn’t do any damage. If anything I feel much better.” He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled the top of her head.

She looked up at him. “And did I mention bossy?”

“I think more than once. Let’s go into the living room. I’d rather meet your parents for the first time there than in the bedroom.” He took a deep breath, felt the instant rush of pain that always came when he forgot and inhaled too deep. He smiled at her anyway. He’d had enough of resting and healing. If she knew just how weak he really was, she’d have him back in bed in a heartbeat and there’d be no more of her teasing mouth and hot body to drain his strength. She’d be feeding him chicken soup.

Abigail looked at him with suspicion, but obligingly helped him stand. “I guess there is a certain disadvantage to meeting parents for the first time in the bedroom, but they’d never think you were weak, Sasha. They aren’t like that at all. They’re very loving and giving people.”

He laughed softly. “I don’t want to be in the bedroom, thinking about you in my bed and what I’d like to be doing with you the moment we’re alone, when we have company.”

She growled, actually growled, scowling up at him with a fierce, no-nonsense expression. Aleksandr burst out laughing, jackknifing pain through this entire body, but it didn’t matter. “You have no idea how much I love you.”

Abigail helped Aleksandr sit in the most comfortable chair just as the doorbell rang. “They’re here,” she announced unnecessarily. She wanted her parents to love him. To see him through her eyes. To see the real Aleksandr, not the hard, ruthless man he presented to the rest of the world.

As she crossed to the door, she realized she had nothing to worry about. Her parents trusted her, loved her, and they would embrace Aleksandr into the family.

Her heart pounding with joy, she flung open the door.

Turn the page for a sneak look at
Christine Feehan’s new novel

NIGHT GAME

coming in November 2005 from Jove

SOMEONE was following her and he was damned good at it. Flame hadn’t spotted him, but her heightened awareness told her she wasn’t alone. And that meant he was a professional. She waited, flattened against the wall, her breath slow and even, her body perfectly still. He was there, close, somewhere inside the estate walls.
And the dog hadnt given a warning
.

Her heart lurched. She had cased the area many times and if anyone went near the brick wall, the dog roared a challenge. It was always on the alert, well trained and eager to ferret out any intruder. She should leave, wait for another night, but she had run out of time. She had to pull off the job tonight in order to meet the deadline. Who else could control a dog that ferocious? She was keeping it from giving away her presence with little effort, but if someone else was also manipulating the dog, that meant they could take control of it.

She swore under her breath. Whitney had found her. It had to be that. She knew she couldn’t run forever. The story in the newspaper about a sanitarium out in the bayou burning to the ground had drawn her. It was exactly the type of situation she knew better than to pursue. If they were looking for her, they would know she wouldn’t be able to resist hunting information. The moment she realized the trail led back to the Whitney Foundation, she should have gotten out. She’d gotten involved with some of the locals, the way she always did, and she’d stayed much too long.

Had they sent an assassin? The fire in the sanitarium had been a hit, plain and simple. The Whitney Foundation had wanted to cover up the fact that genetic and psychic experiments had been done on babies. Damn Whitney and his government contacts. It wasn’t all that hard to create accidents and make people disappear, especially girls who were considered unbalanced or different.

Anger smoldered and that was bad. The ground shifted slightly, a minor seismic anomaly. Flame took a deep breath and let it out slowly to calm herself. That wouldn’t help matters. The dog whined off to her left, sensing the small shift beneath the ground. She quieted the animal with a touch of her mind as she weighed her chances. They would send someone well trained after her, someone with at least equal the skills they would assume she possessed. Chances were better than good that they would underestimate her. And chances were better than good Whitney would want her alive.

She’d hacked into Whitney’s secret files and destroyed what she found on her training and had even managed to destroy some of the files on the other girls after first copying them. Whitney had an impressive empire and his contacts within the government ran deep. There was no doubt in her mind he would eventually send an assassination squad to get rid of the evidence if he couldn’t bring her in—and she wasn’t going back alive. The fire in the sanitarium was proof she was right. She’d read about Whitney’s death, a murder with no body, and she doubted the truth of it. He was a monster, pure and simple, and he would do anything to cover up his crimes.

Flame tapped her finger against her thigh while she worked out her next move. She could play cat and mouse with the hunter, but she couldn’t afford one screwup. Using every sense she had, she once again attempted to locate the shadow. Absolute stillness came back to her. Not even a scent. She wanted to doubt the shrieking alarm bells in her head, but she knew—
knew
—someone was on to her. Then it hit her—the dog. She reached for the animal, trying to connect enough to get the impression of where the other intruder was. The dog would know and if she could get it out of the animal’s mind, she’d be in a much better position.

The moment she touched the dog she knew it was completely under the control of the other intruder. Her heart accelerated abruptly and she had to breathe deeply to counteract the sudden flood of adrenaline. “Rat bastard,” she whispered to herself. “You only think you have the edge.”

She slid further into the darkness behind the hedges and vines crawling up the side of the massive house. She knew exactly where the safe was and how to get to it. She was fast and strong and could be in and out in minutes. Whitney’s hunter had no idea what she was doing or where she would go in. She went up the side of the house, clinging like a spider, moving with stealth and speed to gain the second-story balcony. She went up and over the wrought-iron railing, dropping into a crouch and remaining still while she listened.

Flame glanced at her watch. The guard would be patrolling on this side of the house. She’d timed his movements several times and the idiot always took the same route. He was as reliable as a Swiss clock. She stayed very still, waiting until he had gone around the corner before unzipping her pack and pulling out her crossbow and hook. This balcony was the only real access to the tower roof and the skylight above the office where Saunders kept his safe. Smug jerk that he was, he thought he had it covered with his narrow staircase, the only entranceway being in the house at the bottom of the stairs, with two guards situated there. The tower had no balcony and no other access, with sheer walls and wrought-iron stakes below should one fall in an attempt at climbing.

“Amateur,” she sniffed. Saunders was as dirty and as greedy as they came. She had no compunction whatsoever about proving him an amateur in the area of crime.

The angle to reach the roof was tricky, and there was only one small target she could hook, but she was sure of her aim and took the shot without hesitation. She controlled the sound, keeping the noise of metal grinding on the roof from reverberating through the night. Crouching, she waited for a reaction, hoping the darkness would cover the line pulled taut from balcony to roof. Saunders had some very good guards, but he also had a few lazy ones. She couldn’t imagine he’d have many intruders and the guards were often bored. Saunders had a reputation of being as mean as a cottonmouth. He’d probably put a few dead bodies in the swamp over the years. She didn’t plan on being one of them.

The guards wouldn’t hear the hook, but she had to believe there was a possibility that the man hunting her might if Whitney had sent him. The smart thing for him to do would be to kill her while she was breaking into Saunders’s tower, but it would be nearly impossible for him to collect her body and Whitney would definitely want it. Flame weighed the odds. More than likely, her stalker was sure of himself, certain he could take her when she came out, but much more likely, he was sent to bring her back. Whitney wouldn’t want his multimillion-dollar experiment axed if he could still find a way to use her.

She shrugged, shouldered her pack, and hooked her legs around the line, sliding hand over hand out over the grounds toward the tower. She couldn’t help the little twinge of fear rushing through her at the expectation of a bullet, but she held on to the fact that she was worth more alive than dead to Whitney.

Whitney was a man who liked answers and his adopted daughter was very much like him. Flame had hacked into Lily’s computer a couple of times and had recognized the quick mind and the same driving love of science.
Traitor
. That was how Flame saw Lily. There had been so much favoritism on Whitney’s part. Lily had done what he wanted, become his willing puppet, his accomplice, his doting daughter so he could continue his vile experiments.

What did Lily think happened to the rest of them? Did she believe the bullshit stories in the computers? How could she, when Dahlia had been locked in a sanitarium and a hit squad had destroyed everything she held dear? Lily would pay for that too. Flame would find a way. The Whitney money was an easy and obvious target, but Lily had too much, and hitting a few accounts here or there wasn’t going to make much difference.

As Flame made her hand-over-hand climb to the roof, she focused on finding the man stalking her. She was positive it was the same man she’d noticed at the gas station. He was putting gas in his Jeep, but he was back in the shadows, almost impossible to see, and something about him had had her warning radar shrieking. Several times on the way to Saunders’s estate, she’d had the eerie feeling she was being followed, but there was no sound and no headlights. He
had
to be one of Whitney’s experiments. She knew she wasn’t wrong.

She gained the roof without incident and stored her supplies in the pack just to the left of the skylight. Now the biggest danger was that the hunter might follow her to the tower roof as well. She rigged the line to slip should he attempt to use it. He had to think she was going down the same way she’d gone up. Flame made her way to the skylight, gliding with care so her footsteps couldn’t possibly betray her presence to anyone inside.

Saunders was hunched over his desk, glass of whiskey in hand. He looked pleased with himself. “Slimy little weasel sitting in your ivory tower thinking no one can get to you, but I’m going to take you down.” Flame sank down beside the skylight and lifted her face to the stars. She had to concentrate on the small things, the things she could do, the people to whom she could bring a little justice, not her past.

She couldn’t think about the rigorous training, the long days and nights of feeling like an animal locked in a cage deprived of all dignity, of company, of anything that mattered. In the end, she had triumphed because she learned to be what they wanted her to be and she was far better than any of them had ever discovered. She’d escaped. She smiled, thinking of the bogus trust fund in the computer all set up in her name. She’d made it real and the money came in handy on the run. She’d stolen it from the monster, just as she’d stolen the money for the others, and had it locked up in offshore accounts where the bastard couldn’t touch it. If she succeeded in finding the girls they would at least have money to start some kind of a life. Computer skills came in handy.

She should have left New Orleans the moment she realized she wasn’t going to find Dahlia, but she’d heard about the missing girl. Joy Chiasson. For some terrible reason she identified with the girl, was afraid someone like Whitney had her. It made no sense, but she thought she’d poke around a little and just make certain.

Her throat was sore from singing so much in the last couple of weeks. She’d done three sets in a small club just a half mile from the station where she’d gassed up her motorcycle and her vocal cords were feeling the strain. The idea had been to see if anyone was abnormally interested in her because of her voice, but that idea was sheer idiocy. Too many people followed her from place to place to know if someone was “fixated” on her the way they might have fixated on Joy.